Wireless communication systems are widely spread all over the world to provide various types of communication services such as voice or data. The wireless communication system is designed for the purpose of providing reliable communication to a plurality of users irrespective of their locations and mobility. However, a wireless channel has an abnormal characteristic such as path loss, noise, fading due to multipath, an inter-symbol interference (ISI), the Doppler effect due to mobility of a user equipment, etc. Therefore, various techniques have been developed to overcome the abnormal characteristic of the wireless channel and to increase reliability of wireless communication.
Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) is a technique for supporting reliable high-speed data services. The MIMO technique improves data transmission/reception efficiency by using multiple transmit (Tx) antennas and multiple receive (Rx) antennas. Examples of the MIMO technique include spatial multiplexing, transmit diversity, beamforming, etc. A MIMO channel matrix depending on the number of Rx antennas and the number of Tx antennas can be decomposed into a plurality of independent channels. Each independent channel is referred to as a layer or a stream. The number of layers is referred to as a rank.
In general, the wireless communication system is a multiple access system capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing available radio resources. Examples of the radio resource include a time, a frequency, a code, transmit power, etc. Examples of the multiple access system include a time division multiple access (TDMA) system, a code division multiple access (CDMA) system, a frequency division multiple access (FDMA) system, an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) system, a single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) system, etc. The radio resource is a time in the TDMA system, a code in the CDMA system, and a subcarrier and a time in the OFDMA system.
While having almost the same complexity with the OFDMA, SC-FDMA has a lower peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) due to a single carrier property. Since the low PAPR is advantageous for a user equipment (UE) in terms of transmission power efficiency, the SC-FDMA is adopted for uplink transmission in a 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) long term evolution (LTE) as disclosed in section 5 of the 3GPP TS 36.211 V8.2.0 (2008-03) “Technical Specification Group Radio Access Network; Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA); Physical channels and modulation (Release 8)”.
Various uplink control information are transmitted on an uplink control channel. Examples of the uplink control information include a hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) acknowledgement (ACK)/not-acknowledgement (NACK), a channel quality indicator (CQI) indicating downlink channel quality, a scheduling request (SR) requesting resource allocation for uplink transmission, etc.
Meanwhile, as a mobile communication system of a next generation (i.e., post-3rd generation), an international mobile telecommunication-advanced (IMT-A) system is standardized aiming at support of an Internet protocol (IP)-based seamless multimedia service in an international telecommunication union (ITU) by providing a high-speed transmission rate of 1 gigabits per second (Gbps) in downlink communication and 500 megabits per second (Mbps) in uplink communication. In a 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP), a 3GPP long term evolution-advanced (LTE-A) system is considered as a candidate technique for the IMT-A system. The LTE-A system is evolved to increase a completion level of the LTE system, and is expected to maintain backward compatibility with the LTE system. This is because the provisioning of compatibility between the LTE-A system and the LTE system is advantageous in terms of user convenience, and is also advantageous for a service provider since existing equipment can be reused.
In general, a wireless communication system is a single carrier system supporting a single carrier. The transmission rate is proportional to transmission bandwidth. Therefore, for supporting a high-speed transmission rate, transmission bandwidth shall be increased. However, except for some areas of the world, it is difficult to allocate frequencies of wide bandwidths. For effectively using fragmented small frequency bands, a spectrum aggregation (also referred to as bandwidth aggregation or carrier aggregation) technique is being developed. The spectrum aggregation technique is to obtain the same effect as if which a frequency band of a logically wide bandwidth may be used by aggregating a plurality of physically discontiguous frequency bands in a frequency domain. Through the spectrum aggregation technique, multiple carrier (multi-carrier) can be supported in the wireless communication system. The wireless communication system supporting multi-carrier is referred to as a multi-carrier system. The carrier may be also referred to as a radio frequency (RF), component carrier (CC), etc.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method and an apparatus of effectively transmitting control information in a multi-carrier system.